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Tape Recovery

Tape drive recovery is used by many server and PC backup systems that use tape drives for their data backup. These include tape drives such as 4mm DAT, DLT, Travan, Exabyte 8mm, LTO, Onstream ADR and various QIC formats.

Tape drives are often indispensable to a corporation, as tapes are often the only backup copies of data a company may have. For this reason, failure of a backup tape drive is often deemed potentially disastrous.

Backup data recovery software, including disk cloning imaging software, often uses a variety of internal formats which must be understood by the recovery technician.

Reasons for data loss from tape drives can include:

• Corrupted tape drive headers

• Stretched or broken tape media

• Smoke, Fire or Water damage

• Tape surface damage and contamination

• Accidental overwriting of headers

• Tape backup software corrupted

The Recovery Process

Loss of data from a tape drive is often the most critical data loss situation that a company encounters. A raw image of the server is created, and an assessment of the causes for data loss is derived. Any potential physical damage is addressed and components replaced where possible. The recovery of damaged tape media often involves cleaning, splicing & re-spooling the intact segments of tape. Usually, specialized tools and software are necessary for obtaining the raw image required for recovery of data from tape.

Using the raw image, an examination of the low-level data sectors is attempted and the determination of how to fix the tape format structures is carried out in order to access the critical data. There are occasions where the data must be extracted from the raw image as a result of the structure being too badly damaged or even nonexistent.

Tape drives present a unique challenge to data recovery specialists and, under most circumstances, recovery should only be attempted by professionals.

Find out if your lost tape data be recovered using software.

Contact us for more information.

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